The prior art is familiar with computer aided design (CAD) software to create, verify and analyze electronic designs, including designs for microprocessor and digital signal processor (DSP) chips. Such software for example provides for system level design, verification, analysis and simulated testing of register-transfer logic (RTL), gates and physical layout structures. In one example, certain CAD software may further perform transistor-level timing analyses of electronic designs.
Power efficiency within the electronic design is important because, among other reasons, power may often be traded for increased performance. With the increasing complexity of electronic designs—often exceeding one billion components—optimizing power consumption within the circuit design is thus increasingly difficult. Power consumption within the electronic design may derive from several sources, including dynamic switching power of capacitors, DC currents including leakage from diodes, and crossover currents in static complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic using field effect transistors (FETs), such as metaloxide silicon field effect transistors (MOSFETs). As used hereinafter, a FET and a MOSFET are each denoted as a FET.
Modern circuit designs have seen a decrease in dynamic power consumption; static power consumption analysis and optimization of the electronic design has thus become increasingly important. Accordingly, crossover current within inverters incorporating CMOS FETs has increasing relevance to power consumption within modern circuit designs. At the same time, software such as SPICE has a very long run time.